Riverbed Technology announced the release of Riverbed SteelCentral UCExpert 5.0, the latest version of its unified communications (UC) performance management solution, with added support for Avaya UC solutions.
SteelCentral UCExpert 5.0 ensures the performance of business-critical VoIP communications and identifies problems before users notice, reducing downtime through proactive management of a company’s UC environment.
Riverbed is the only vendor that supports the entire UC lifecycle for both Cisco and Avaya deployments with automated testing using actual phones, configuration management and remote troubleshooting without end-user involvement.
“Organizations are consuming a lot of resources to deploy enterprise unified communications platforms, but successful deployment is measured against the quality of the end user experience. When there are performance issues, native UC administrative tools often do not provide complete information to understand the scope and root cause, which reduces productivity and ROI,” said Nik Koutsoukos, senior director product marketing, SteelCentral. “SteelCentral UCExpert 5.0 allows organizations to reduce costs, improve productivity and be proactive in managing the complete lifecycle – deployment, change and ongoing management – of their unified communications environment.”
Ensuring consistent service availability and a superior end-user experience for UC applications is critical to the successful adoption of these apps by end users across the enterprise. According to the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, “the quality and effectiveness of the overall user experience across all devices will heavily influence the effectiveness of the solution, its adoption rate and, ultimately, enterprise productivity.” Avaya has been a long-time industry leader in UC and IP Telephony and was cited as a leader in the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications.
Call center managers need to ensure that customer-facing, critical numbers are always available and the need to route calls properly to prevent disruption to the business. With SteelCentral UCExpert, managers can schedule regular testing of these numbers to verify they are available and responsive before any customer-impacting issues occur. Also, the configuration management feature allows help desk teams to instantly compare phone configurations and identify specific settings that are incorrectly set, providing valuable intelligence and shortcutting the process for level 3 telecom teams performing the actual troubleshooting.
SteelCentral UCExpert is part of the Riverbed SteelCentral product family (formerly OPNET, Cascade and NEOP), recognized by Gartner as the only “Leader” in the Magic Quadrants for both Application Performance Monitoring (2013) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (2014). SteelCentral is the only performance management and control suite that combines user experience, application and network performance management to provide the visibility needed to diagnose and resolve issues before end users notice a problem, call the help desk to complain or jump to another web site out of frustration. Riverbed SteelCentral is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.
SteelCentral UCExpert 5.0 is currently available.
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